Adobe Learning Manager in the Adobe Digital Learning Solutions ecosystem

In addition to being part of the Adobe Experience Cloud, Learning Manager is one of three eLearning-related products developed by Adobe. The other two are Adobe Captivate and Adobe Connect.

Of course, Adobe has developed tight integrations between these three products, so customers using all three of them have some added benefits. That being said, Adobe has taken great care of developing these applications around well-established industry standards such as HTML5, SCORM, and xAPI. This means that Adobe Digital Learning Solutions seamlessly integrates with any third-party authoring tool, application, or service, not only with other Adobe-branded solutions.

In this section, you will explore the Adobe Digital Learning tools and services in more detail to better understand how they fit into one another.

More information

More information on Adobe Digital Learning Solutions can be found at https://www.adobe.com/elearning.html.

Adobe Captivate

Adobe Captivate is an award-winning eLearning authoring tool. You can use Adobe Captivate to create various types of interactive eLearning content, such as compliance training, interactive videos, highly engaging quizzes, virtual reality training, software simulations, and more.

Content created with Adobe Captivate must be deployed on an LMS to be delivered to students. This LMS can be Adobe Learning Manager, but it can also be any other third-party LMS. This is an important consideration. Since Captivate and Learning Manager are both Adobe products, some users believe that content hosted in Learning Manager must be generated by Captivate and that content generated by Captivate can only be uploaded to Learning Manager. Both these statements are entirely false:

• The content generated by Adobe Captivate can be uploaded to any AICC-, SCORM-, or xAPI-compliant LMS.
• The content hosted on Adobe Learning manager can be generated by any authoring tool, providing that the authoring tool can generate an AICC-, SCORM-, or XAPI-compliant package (which they should all be able to do!).

The only benefit you get when you create the learning content with Adobe Captivate is that you have a direct publishing mechanism from Adobe Captivate to Learning Manager, as well as some additional data available in the course reports. Otherwise, the two are completely separate systems.

Note

AICC, SCORM, and xAPI are three standards that are used in the eLearning industry to enable communication between the learning content and the LMS it is hosted on.

To summarize this section, just remember that Adobe Captivate is used to create learning content, while Adobe Learning Manager is used to host, deliver, and track learning content.

More information

More information about Adobe Captivate can be found at https://www.adobe.com/products/captivate.html.

Adobe Connect

Adobe Connect is an award-winning virtual classroom delivery solution. The learning activities that are delivered by Adobe Connect are said to be synchronous, versus the asynchronous content generated by Adobe Captivate:

• A synchronous learning activity is an activity where all the learners are connected at the same time. A typical synchronous learning activity is a virtual class, but a webinar or a live stream can also be considered a synchronous activity.
• An asynchronous learning activity is an on-demand course module that is published on an LMS. Each learner is free to visit the content at their convenience. Typical asynchronous learning activities include instructional videos, online quizzes, PDF files, or PowerPoint presentations that are hosted on an LMS.

An online course can include both synchronous and asynchronous activities. For example, you can ask students to review a series of instructional videos posted online before attending an instructor-led live or virtual class. Mixing techniques in such a way is often called blended learning. The overall learning experience that you offer your learners is a blend of asynchronous and synchronous activities. In Chapter 4, Creating Skills and Courses, you will learn how to assemble various types of learning activities into courses. For now, all you need to remember is that Adobe Learning Manager supports both synchronous and asynchronous activities.

When it comes to adding synchronous virtual activities to a course, a large array of virtual classroom solutions can be used, with some of the most popular being Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Hangouts. Adobe Connect is just one of the available solutions.

Learning Manager supports any virtual class solution, but if you’re using Adobe Connect, you have some additional benefits. For example, ALM can automatically retrieve information (such as the room name, the room URL, scheduled meetings, the list of authorized trainers, and more) from your Connect account, making it easy to add an Adobe Connect-powered virtual class to your ALM courses.

More information

For more information on Adobe Connect, you can browse the official Adobe Connect home page at https://www.adobe.com/products/adobeconnect.html.

Conclusion

With Adobe Captivate, Adobe Connect, and Adobe Learning Manager, Adobe has a very powerful ecosystem of services and applications that allow you to conduct virtually any kind of online learning activity:

• You can create a wide range of asynchronous learning content with Adobe Captivate.
• You can conduct very effective synchronous virtual class activities with Adobe Connect.
• Finally, you can assemble these building blocks into courses and deliver the content to the right learner using Adobe Learning Manager.

Even though this ecosystem is very powerful and well-integrated, Adobe does not force you to use all three of these products together.

Adobe Learning Manager seamlessly integrates with any asynchronous eLearning authoring tool, providing the chosen tool can generate AICC-, SCORM-, or xAPI-compliant packages (which is something they should all do). Learning Manager also supports any synchronous virtual classroom solution, not just Adobe Connect. So, you are free to mix and match any solutions from any vendor when building online courses with Adobe Learning Manager.

That being said, if you decide to stick with Adobe solutions, you will be able to leverage some nice integrations that streamline your workflows and make your life easier.

By now, you should have a good high-level overview of what Adobe Learning Manager is and how it fits into the Adobe ecosystem. If you’re like me, I bet that makes you eager to learn about the platform hands-on! Well, that’s exactly what you’re going to do, starting with the next section.